netbsd-help: RE: can't figure out port forwarding. :-(

Subject: RE: can't figure out port forwarding. :-(
To: None <fernando@rxp.com, netbsd-help@netbsd.org>
From: Richard Rauch <rkr@olib.org>
List: netbsd-help
Date: 05/27/2003 18:05:11

Re. http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-help/2003/05/27/0006.html
[Convention: I refer to a certain OS/company as "Evil Empire" primarily
because someone has suggested in the past that naming them directly
increases the number of "hits" that the mailing list gets when people
go search for help with Evil Empire problems. Every few months, someone
wanders in asking us to send them a driver for their CD ROM in their
Evil Empire computer.]
Some general comments:
 * You probably will learn more about running and using UNIX if you
 hunker down and live with the command line. That doesn't mean
 that it's worthwhile for everyone to do, of course. (^&
 * vi is actually a fairly nice editor. It does, like the rest of
 the system, take some getting used to. NetBSD ships with four
 editors that I'm aware of:
 ed *really* primitive. Useful in emergencies if your system
 fails to boot multiuser. (Though due to a change made since
 the 1.3 days, ed is no longer runnable if you fail a multiuser
 boot; you have to manually "mount -a"; I'm told that it is
 then once more usable in singleuser mode.)
 ex A kind of souped-up, slightly incompatible, version of ed,
 which I have never used. (^&
 sed Stream EDitor, kind of like ed, but more intended to be used
 by scripts to automatically do edits than for interactive use.
 vi A "visual" screen-editor that you have started to use.
 
 I've had occasion to use every one of these except ex. I think
 that ed would be better if it would work (as it used to) even when
 only / is mounted in a default config under singleuser. My first
 use of NetBSD ed was when I first installed NetBSD and forgot to tell
 /etc/rc.conf that I wanted a multiuser boot. ed let me view/edit
 /etc/rc.conf comfortably.
 I'm writing this email in vi on my (headless) web-/mail-server.
 For some tasks I use GNU EMACS.
 * You probably don't *need* any of the packages for your firewall.
 However, if you really hate vi, you might consider looking at
 pkgsrc (or pre-built packages in the "binary packages" arm of
 the NetBSD package system). Some editors can use X, some
 require X, some use text.
 * You *can* use graphical applications remotely. This is one of
 the nice thigns about the X Window System. X is network-trans-
 parent. If your firewall is headless, you won't get much benefit
 from setting up X on the firewall, but if you have the libraries
 installed you can run X applications. If you have an X server
 running on your Evil Empire computers, you can have the firewall
 open windows remotely. (The easiest, reasonably secure way to
 do this is to ssh into the firewall and have ssh provide for
 forwarding an X session. On the firewall side, this is as simple
 as modifying the config file for sshd. On the Evil Empire side,
 you are a bit more on your own. Though the Cygwin project may
 be helpful. I don't know if Putty is of any help for this.)
-- 
 "I probably don't know what I'm talking about." http://www.olib.org/~rkr/